Energy

Chinese inverter manufacturer Sungrow shipped 130 GW of inverters last year, reaching a profit of $1.3 billion.

An Australian research group has used an SMA inverter to switch the operating point of a PV array and has demonstrated its ability to create photoluminescence images for both rooftop and large scale solar installations.

China Securities has revised its annual guidance for China, predicting up to 280 GW of new PV installations this year, while glass manufacturer Kibing and wafer maker HySolar revealed new solar investment plans.

DNV forecasts that solar energy in China will account for 38% of the country’s electricity production by 2050, compared to 5% at present, with more than one-third of solar capacity to be combined with storage by the middle of the century.

The France-based group said its has released two new BESSs with enclosures of 7ft and 20ft. Their power ranges from 60 kW to 500 kW.

In a new weekly update for pv magazine, Solcast, a DNV company, reports that warm sea surface temperatures and disturbances increased onshore moisture along China’s southern coast, which in turn increased solar irradiance by 5-15% on long term averages.

The Korea Institute of Energy Research has developed a solid oxide electrolysis cell stack that uses a special kind of separator plate to ensure proper flow of hydrogen and oxigen after water splitting. Samsung Electro-Mechanics and Bumhan Industries are now cooperating with the research center to improve relevant manufacturing process.

German and Swedish researchers calculated the supply of materials to produce perovskite tandem PV at a multi-terawatt-scale, flagging the difficult supply of gold, indium and cesium, well as a need to streamline production of certain materials used for hole-transport layers. “In essence, we might be able to go post-fossil fuels, but we can’t go post-minerals,” the research’s corresponding author, Lukas Wagner, told pv magazine.

Researchers in China have designed a two-stage, solar-assisted thermochemical heat pump system that uses caustic soda and water as a working pair. The system is reportedly able to achieve an energy storage density of 363 kWh/m3 and is considered by its creators an ideal solution for residential buildings with limited space.

As the US Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) ramps up clean energy efforts across the United States, the government has outlined a plan to expand transmission lines to accommodate more power.